Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

These days, Social Networking is a buzz-phrase that companies try to milk leverage for all it’s worth.  However, what does social networking really mean for your company’s brand?

While this is not a question that is easily answered, the following visualization is an attempt at conveying the convergence of people and technology through (and across) the various media channels in the pursuit of understanding brand perception.

If you will notice, People and Technology are complementary to each other, and the Digital Divide is what separates the people with the technology “haves” from the “have nots”. People themselves, of course, are products of Individual, Social, and Cultural interactions. On the other hand, in the technology pyramid, Utility, Usability, and ultimately what I call Sociability are what help bridge the digital divide. Decreased Digital Divide is therefore good since it indicates a pervasiveness of technology in bringing people closer together.

The other end of the spectrum consists of Media and Brand, which are also complementary to each other.  However, whereas technology helps bring people together, a variety of channels are shared by both Media and Brand, through which a company’s brand is perceived. These channels are mainly Print, A/V (which includes Television, Radio, and others), and — most importantly — Digital. Brand perception takes place through the level of Engagement of your company (and consequently, it’s brand) with its customers and consumers across the various channels. Therefore, increased Engagement is also good as it is an indicator of the extent to which your consumers associate with your brand across the various media channels.

In conclusion, as technology continues to become an enabler for social interaction, you can leverage the decreasing digital divide for increased engagement of your brand. Happiness (hopefully) ensues.

An excellent piece by Robert J. Moore of RJ Metrics called Twitter Data Analysis: An Investor’s Perspective that goes into how a potential investor would perform analytics on a platform like Twitter before investing.

With the use of some very basic statistics that’s easily available through Twitter’s API, he performs a very interesting cohort analysis of user activity and engagement activity.

Fascinating stuff. A few thoughts from my end –

• How could this be monetized based on user preferences, demographics (those of users & followers) etc?
• What will be needed to encouraged people to tweet more?  I’ve been on Twitter for a long time, but I’ve less than 10 tweets. Surprisingly, I’ve 45 followers.
• What could be done about bots? More importantly, how could user credibility be built (ratings, karma, community moderation etc)?
• On the same note, how about differentiating corporate users? E.g. Google’s official Twitter channel vs. that of their fans (and detractors, of course).

I particularly liked ~7:36 and ~18:18.

Interesting new technology called Siftables showcased at TED Talks.